When I was CEO of HSX – I shared a board seat with members who were also on the board of Lionsgate Films.

Lionsgate was constantly moving the prices of their films (or films they had an interest in, or a friend’s film) on HSX as a way to manipulate perception and marketing dollar spends.

This conflict blew up in the now famous Access Hollywood incident-http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-11-16/news/access-denied/I was stopped from reporting the real numbers on HSX on Access Hollywood and prices from that moment forward were controlled by people who whose interests lay with the studios.

I went to war with the rest of the board to defend my creation, and my technology, and all the IP that is HSX/Cantorx – board members included Citibank and NBC who sided with the studios – in allowing the prices on HSX to be moved per ‘marketing’ requests made by the studios. This lead to a blowout on the board and my leaving HSX as a result.

Shortly thereafter, the same dissident board members engineered the deal with Cantor for HSX – that has yet to be consummated. None of the investors who put $40 mn. into HSX have ever seen a penny from Cantor. There is no paper trail that links Cantor to HSX. Cantor claims everything was lost on 9/11.

Now – they hope to take the studio/wall st. collusion to the next level via Cantor Exchange. Bart Chilton is right to be suspicious of this. Will they really due their due diligence? Doubtful. This is Wall St. we’re talking about.

Personally, I put 95% of my wealth in gold bullion 8 years ago – so to be clear – another blowup of another exchange will only drive the price of gold higher – so I am half-wanting to see this catastrophe unfold.

The idea that betting could help us gain clarity on some controversial scientific questions has first been proposed by George Mason economics professor Robin Hanson in 1992 in a paper entitled &#8220-Could Gambling Save Science&#8221- and available online here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.html

Actually, I would like to see for such collective events (senate races, oscars etc), to see a “meta-market” in each exchange:

“How many events is our exchange going to guess correctly?”

In principle, it should be possible to price correctly such contracts using the reported probabilities and their dependencies. This should give some extra attention to the fact that markets are not supposed to get everything correctly to be accurate.

Panos Ipeirotis&#8217-s blog [*] and website

[*] Great name (&#8221-Behind The Enemy&#8217-s Lines&#8221-) &#8212-but where does the name come from?